In today's technological environment, it is common for people to most-frequently communicate via electronic mail (i.e., email) messages. That is, given the proliferation of computers in homes, schools and work places, email messages are frequently exchanged between friends, family, classmates and coworkers, respectively. Such email messages allow near-instant collaboration among such classes of people and has become the communications medium of choice, surpassing traditional, postal mail (i.e., “snail mail” as it is now commonly referred to) and even traditional telephone calls.
As email systems have become more advance, the attachment of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentation files, photographs, music and multimedia files to accompany typical text email messages have also become commonplace. That is, the technological advancement of email system servers (now allowing the sending and receiving of larger-sized messages), their associated communications networks (with improved transmission bandwidth), and email reader software applications (with improved graphical user interfaces), allow users to not only collaborate via the text contained in the email messages themselves, but via such attachments (and the information contained herein).
As a (negative) result of the above-described technological advancements users often switch between at least two software applications to view the (textual) contents of email messages and to view the contents of any attachments. For example, a user typically may utilize an email reader software application to view the contents of an email message, but must launch a productivity application such as a word processing software application to view the contents of a word processing file attached to the email message. This leads to the often “back-and-forth” between different screens in different software applications executing on a computer system.
Given the foregoing, what are needed are systems, methods and computer program products for facilitating the simultaneous viewing of email messages and any attachments to such email messages.